Wherefore art thou - freeCodeCamp using Modern JavaScript #4

This time it's all about comparing objects - a tricky issue in JavaScript. It seems self-evident that {'a': 1} === {'a': 1} returns true but that is not so - we are comparing if they are literally the same object, not if they contain the same key-value pairs.

For this challenge we are passed an array of objects, and a source object. We should check if all the key-value pairs of the source are found in an object of the array, and if so return it.

Ok, so the first thing to realize is that we are given an array, and will return a subset of it. That's what filter is for, so let's use it.

Now we are down to a simpler problem: checking if any object in the collection is a superset of the source object. Various JavaScript libraries provide that functionality, but we'll do it from scratch. So as we've seen at the beginning we can't just compare objects using ===, but we can compare it's keys. Object.keys() gives us an array of an object's keys.

functionwhatIsInAName(collection, source){return collection.filter(object =>{return Object.keys(source)// ...// we'll compare that with the keys we find in the collection});};

Once we have a key we can do object[key] === source[key] to hit two birds with one stone - check if the object has the key, and check if it's associated value is the same as the source's.
That works for all cases except when the key is literally assigned to undefined, in which case we can't distinguish it from a missing key, but we'll leave this aside for simplicity's sake.

Almost done! Last thing is to chain the pieces together using the ES6 every method that checks if all elements in an array match a condition. That way it'll work even if the source object has multiple entries.

Solution

One more thing

Something cool about ES6 arrow functions: if we intend to return the whole body of a function we don't have to wrap it in curly braces - the return keyword is implicit. Just for fun, but this makes it a one-liner 😎